2023
What does Dawood say to his son to make him come back? Perhaps he is frightened enough of his own son to tread carefully. I spoke to Encik Yusuf and he understands his mistake. He can’t just sack the women and send them home just like that but they’ll be covering their hair from now at least so you won’t have to see that. But one can just as easily imagine Dawood choosing to focus on his main objective. Okayfine. You said you can’t enter that house because Encik Yusuf is not related to those women yet they don’t cover their hair. Well now they’re covering their hair so you’ve no excuse. And living under his father’s roof on the profits of his father’s empire the boy would’ve realized the game was up. Ideals are one thing but having enough shame to get out of the house and get a job is entirely another.
One thing is clear: he is not happy to be back.
“Boy, so nice to see you again!” Mama calls out to him on his first day back. But he barely darts her an obligatory glance. Grunts a greeting no one can make out through his bushy beard and strides past her. Gone are the days of bowing his head so low to salam Nenek that you could only see the curtain of his lashes.
He knows we are following only the letter of the law. He knows the minute his back is turned nothing can make us follow the rules of his exacting God. He knows we are still (at best) a house of sin waiting to happen. But he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Not a strand of hair is visible from under Ani’s tudung when he comes to the house. She does not just refrain from speaking to me or making eye contact; she stays in the back room. Hana leaves the house and comes back nicely betudunged from her various jobs. Between the housecleaning and the Chinese restaurant she keeps her tudung on to sit bent over her books and her newspaper in the kitchen. As far as I can tell I had only to say the word for both of them to embrace this new requirement wholeheartedly. “People are talking,” I said. The moment I’d said it both women hung their heads in shame as though their responsibility for my reputation had been weighing on them all along.
In his habitual seat in the back row Amar glares at me with his now-familiar mix of detachment and disgust. His blank eyes his lip curled. Leaning as far back as he can with his arms folded. Silently refusing to look at my photocopies of John Donne and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. How he can barely bring himself to touch a piece of paper with a Shakespeare sonnet on it. Oh the shameless literary canon of infidels. Everything hanging out. All those boners masquerading as poems.
Like this he quietly comes and goes for a few weeks. Here but not here. I wonder what Dawood will do when he fails the paper. I make no promises or guarantees after all. The man can’t come here asking for his money back. Best thing is to keep quiet and let the boy warm his seat and fail the paper. It might even be a good awakening. With no other options he might settle down and start listening to his father about practical necessities like earning a living.
One day out of the blue Mama summons him as he’s leaving. Either she’s forgotten the snub (today she is wearing the bonnet and with it comes the unreliable memory of the bonnet wearer) or forgiven it. She’s positioned herself strategically in the front hall. She sits in a pool of sunshine with a pile of Malay women’s magazines in her lap.
“Come here,” she says. “Come and sit with Nenek like you used to when you were small.”
Seventy-year-old Nenek in a bonnet: he cannot rely on the excuse of not talking to marriageable women outside the family or whatever it is these flers say. He stares at her with startled eyes.
“Nenek wants to talk to you,” she says.
He shoots me a panicked look. But why should I save him from her? Thinks I’m filth and then wants me to help him. Ha!
“Ish, takut apa?” she giggles. “You’ve known Nenek from small isn’t it? You know Nenek doesn’t bite. Nothing important, Nenek is just feeling lonely.”
I see it happen right before my eyes: all the firebrand stubbornness goes out of him. Even living in his father’s house and eating his father’s food doesn’t do this to him but Mama with her yellow-toothed smile turns him into a little boy trained to respect the elderly. He sits.
“Your whole life Nenek has been watching you, you know,” she says.
Words that have never in history reassured any human being. He stiffens and folds his arms.
“Tsk, nothing bad lah. But today Nenek wants to tell you something. The reason Nenek has always noticed you is because you look like Nenek’s son.”
At the sight of his wide eyes she throws her head back and laughs.
“Not this son, lah. Not your teacher. Nenek had another son. My older son. Looked just like you! Ask his brother and see.”
But he doesn’t ask and I don’t answer.
“My older son—his name is Reza—passed away. He drowned in a pond when he was eighteen years old. But a mother can never forget. A mother can never get over it.”
“Mama—” I begin but she holds up a finger and I think: Why do we owe this boy the truth anyway? Let her tell him what she wants. Whatever suits her fancy today.
“It was the biggest tragedy of my life,” she says. My, not Nenek’s: I can tell from the barely perceptible double take that Amar too has marked the change. “I think of him every day. But at least … at least now I don’t just think of his body when they dredged him up. Sometimes of course I do. But other times I manage to remember him as he was. Young. Handsome.”
An infinitesimal nod from Amar. For a while she bathes him in the high beam of her yellow-toothed grandmother-hen smile. Then she says, “You’re hoping to go overseas?”
He shrugs. “Depends on my father,” he squeaks. Suddenly he sounds like a pubescent boy again.
“Ah.”
They nod in concert. She leans forward.
“You must study hard lah in that case. Because you’re a good boy. You won’t be like these other youngsters who go overseas and get tempted by the orang puteh way of life. It’s boys like you who should go overseas. Because you will keep your iman and your culture and not just that you will show them a good example. And like that you can lead them to the beauty of Islam. I’m not saying everybody lah. But a few will see the truth. Isn’t it?”
He’s still nodding. Perhaps he never stopped.
“Boys like you are so rare, when we see one we really want you to be successful.”
He scratches his head like a loveable cartoon idiot.
“Sitting here so lonely all day long, every day, I can’t help it, I start thinking of old stories. I know it’s silly but I feel like you’re my grandson because you look so much like my son.”
She chuckles to herself. They sit in silence until she sighs and says, “I better let you go lah. I’ll see you next week. Think about what I said, okay?”
He puts both his hands in his lap like a child posing for a studio photograph in the 1960s.
“Ya, Nenek,” he says. “Thank you. Bye.”
Then he gets up and walks to the door. I could swear his walk looks different now. The tentative swagger of a boy just learning how to perform the rituals of manliness.